Principal's Message

Kia ora e te whānau

We have had multiple opportunities to reinforce mathematics across the school over the past few weeks and have enjoyed engaging with your tamariki in the classroom during this time.

Our school has focused on mathematics teaching since 2022. The goal of this initaitve has been to strengthen teachers' ability to effectively notice, recognise, and respond to diverse student learning. To do this, we have been working with an externally accredited provider, Sarah Cobb, Facilitator for Mathematically Minded and Associate of Learning Solutions.

Sarah has worked alongside teachers to plan, teach, model, observe and provide feedback to enhance quality practice for improved student learning.

Sarah has been part of our school team conducting observations to identify school-wide strengths and next steps for further development. The team included our two Deputy Principals (Riki and Paul), myself, and Team Leaders. We established criteria aligned with our Principles of Teaching @ Marshland to guide our evidence-gathering process. This information is now being combined, analysed, and shared to Kaimahi to support next steps.

The highlight of this experience was 100% the opportunity to see your tamariki engaging in learning and sharing their mathematical experiences with us.

I had some fun conversations with tamariki from Years 3-4 today. Jay, Leo, Theo, Lilly, Maddie, and Indi gave me wonderful examples of how they see maths used outside school. This included when they're being driven around in the car, including a great story about how one can see Nana drives about 5 km above the speed limit from the back seat. Jay also told me that they try to get in the car and off to school by 8:45am, but sometimes things just blow out, and they don't leave until 8:46am! The group of students also expressed how much are all enjoying learning about multiplication and division in class and being challenged when working with bigger numbers.

We have made great strides in strengthening the consistency and quality of explicit teaching across the school to meet diverse student needs. This is no easy feat, especially when teachers are faced with so much change across the whole curriculum, increasingly complex demands in the classroom and high expectations of student learning success.

Our teachers draw on a range of teaching approaches that reflect more than one teaching theory when teaching maths. For example, developing the recall of number sense, providing a combination of teaching sequential steps with increasing complexity, rich problems that require students to apply their learning, using materials, mental strategies, and working through pen and paper methods to solve equations.

During these observations, I took photos of students engaged in the instructional practice or explicit teaching element of a maths lesson. However, our tamariki are also involved in guided practice follow-up tasks and independent maths activities to reinforce prior learning and number sense.

I hope you enjoy the examples of our mathematics teaching and look forward to sharing other learning examples with you in the future.

Noho ora mai

Leigh Fowler